Sunday 9th Mar, 2014
By Fiona Czerniawska Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
Friday 1st Nov, 2013
“M&A deals reduce competition and distract consultants from what should be their primary focus; their clients.” Those views, of a senior executive we spoke to last year, are pretty typical: deals between big firms don’t add value to clients; if anything, they destroy it.
Thursday 31st Oct, 2013
By Fiona Czerniawska Yesterday’s announcement, that PwC and Booz & Company have signed a conditional merger agreement, comes as something of a relief. The consulting industry has been awash with rumours, some intriguing, some bizarre, since the summer and now – finally – there’s something concrete to react to.
Wednesday 14th Aug, 2013
When Deloitte bought Monitor back in January, we posited publicly that an acquisitions arms race might ensue. Deloitte's move, we suggested, breached the walls of fortress strategy and opened up the possibility that the Big Four would pour through the hole.
Friday 21st Jun, 2013
By Edward Haigh I've written somewhere in the region of 150,000 words about the consulting market in the last three months. That's, like, a couple of books-worth or something. I'm the Barbara Cartland of the consulting industry. Actually, let's not go any further with that idea. Anyway, it's only a rough guess but I'd say that about 149,998 of those words have been about pragmatic, hard-nosed, results-focused, transformative, implementative consulting. The other two words were about blue-sky, hot-air, results-agnostic consulting. And they were, if I remember rightly, 'nothing' and 'doing'.
Monday 18th Mar, 2013
By Fiona Czerniawska Now would be a good time. In our peregrinations through the offices of the world’s consulting firms, the talk is all about consolidation. That’s neither new nor surprising. It has escaped no one’s attention that the pace of organic growth in many markets won’t meet consulting firms’ ambitions. The acquisition of boutique firms by bigger ones is an important way in which the latter build their capabilities in specialist areas. Supply-side fragmentation results in diseconomies of scale; internecine competition is bringing down margins.
Friday 7th Dec, 2012
Deloitte’s acquisition of Monitor (see my previous post) may have unintended consequences, a bit like that apocryphal butterfly which, flapping its delicate wings on one side of the world, triggers a hurricane on the other. Deloitte may be being unusually quiet about the move, but it’s provoked widespread discussion right across the consulting industry. Why?
Tuesday 4th Dec, 2012
Writing up some of our client research earlier this year, we estimated that as much as 15% of all consulting goes on what we called ‘validation’, an activity which ranged from genuine research and analysis around a particularly thorny issue to signing off on a decision already effectively made by senior managers.
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